This Blog is dedicated to Brent Goose - the smallest and northernmost breeding goose in the World, and the one that also undertakes some of the longest non-stop journeys of any goose species in the World. It was launched with our Brenttags project in May 2011 - funded by the Norwegian Directorate for Nature Management. Blog revived with the successful addition of 9 satellite tagged birds in May 2012. All pictures can be seen in a higher resolution by clicking on them.

1 Feb 2012

13 January 2012: Highland Ringing Group joins the Brenttags team

At last success.After having set nets 5 times and spent around 50 hours of trying, Simon Foster and Carl Mitchell from the Highland Ringing Group finally succeeded in catching a little group of 10 Light-bellied Brent Geese near Nairn on the Moray Firth, Scotland. The birds were colour-ringed individually with “our rings”. This capture is exciting because previous records of metal as well as colour-ringed birds from this region of Scotland have involved birds ringed in Svalbard, Lindisfarne and Denmark, thus from the East Atlantic flyway-population, but also birds ringed in Ireland and Iceland, hence from the East Canadian High Arctic flyway-population – but we do not know whether this area is an overlap zone or whether birds from one flyway-population are “regulars” and birds from the other are “stragglers” blown over. It will be exciting to see if some of these birds fly to spring-staging areas in Denmark and others to Iceland, or they all move in one direction.

Photo is Simon Foster holding one of the 10 caught birds. The map shows the two mentioned flyways as currently understood - where the orange dot indicate the catch area.

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About

We (Preben Clausen, Tony Fox, Kevin Clausen, Marie Silberling Vissing) are a group of happy goose researchers from Department of Bioscience at Aarhus University who will be sharing the results of the Brentttags project with you